


A Spot of Arago

by AMarguerite



Series: Some Innocent Merriment [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: F/M, Romanticism, Science, attempts at symoblism, sneaky cameos from La Boheme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 23:37:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/680169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jehan frolics on the symbolic plane, Joly and Combeferre manipulate natural law against itself, and Joly and Jehan get into an intellectual duel over the nature of light, all for the sake of one Musichetta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> merlin_emrys on Abaissé requested Joly, Jehan and Courfeyrac. Why Bossuet and Musichetta tagged along for the ride and why there is so much fail!science in here is one of those unavoidable results of having Joly as your viewpoint character of choice. All credit for Enjolras's Platonic form goes to The Highest Pie, who shows that, like pie, people are layered, and in her case, her wit is kept piping hot between two layers of win.

Somehow Courfeyrac had taken it into his head that Feuilly needed to be wooed into joining the Amis, just as one had to woo a recalcitrant grisette into one's arms. No one was quite sure how this had happened, but Bahorel, Joly and Bossuet had several bets on the subject. Bahorel thought that Courfeyrac had come up the idea himself and was so fascinated with his new toy (i.e. Feuilly) he simply  _had_ to have him as their token member of the working class. Joly was convinced that Courfeyrac had misinterpreted Combeferre's request that they treat Feuilly with just a tad more delicacy any other student they would wish to befriend. Bossuet had devised an elaborate theory wherein, after Enjolras had pulled Courfeyrac aside the night Feuilly had met the group, the two of them had come up with an elaborate plan to shanghai Feuilly into joining that included Courfeyrac making Feuilly into a pet, much the way Combeferre had tried to make pets of Joly and Jehan, and tempting Feuilly into joining them à la Mephistopheles with pastry and political argument, at which point Enjolras would spring up out of the floorboards and administer the loyalty oaths.

Jehan, who had declined to join their betting pool, but engaged in their debate, pointed out that Enjolras was more likely to hesitate and then mention that Courfeyrac was better suited to making Feuilly feel like a comfortable, welcome part of their circle ("Because Courfeyrac could seduce Martin Luther into a life of bohemian Romanticism and secret republican activism," as Jehan pointed out, looking extremely disgruntled when Joly, Grantaire and Bossuet had started laughing at the word 'seduce'). Grantaire had then bet an unspecified sum that Enjolras would win over Feuilly rather than Courfeyrac and drank until he started babbling incoherently about gradation of beauty and virtue and Courfeyrac's role as Socrates to Enjolras's Diotima.

"Looking at this poetically," said Jehan, in an undertone to Joly, upon whose lap he had laid his head, "one can see, perhaps, the wreckage of the gradations of beauty in Grantaire, but even then, one would have to be feeling extremely charitable and be unusually alive to the glories of one's fellow man. I am more inclined to see him as a Romantic ruin, created of a classicism that has no place in the world any longer. Or... a Tintern Abbey of sorts that one can look upon to inspire sorrow or inward reflection about the changes wrought in nature and then, from the inward turning he so kindly inspires, be divinely inspired and leap into the sublime. There is always something grotesque in the sublime."

Joly, being more than a little drunk, patted Jehan on the forehead, but said nothing. He was vaguely uncomfortable with Jehan, as he was with anyone or anything that he did not understand past the point of bearing it with cheerful resignation. Though, Joly thought to himself, that was not it entirely. He often just got ideas stuck in his head, along no lines of logic he could quite understand, and started overthinking them and trying to rationalize them and contextualize them until he had worked himself up into a panic and needed Bossuet or Courfeyrac or someone to force him to think of something else. As it was, he was relatively sure he had seen Jehan kiss Combeferre but, as Joly had been three sheets to the wind at that point and also mildly feverish, he kept doubting what he saw. He was not  _sure_ and the uncertainty was putting a brittle edge to his usual high spirits. Bossuet had noticed and asked, in his gentle, joking way, if Joly was feeling alright, but Joly couldn't find the words to explain. What exactly was one supposed to  _say_?

"Oh yes, fine, Bossuet, I just saw Jehan going completely fairy on us, is all. More wine?"

"I finally found a way to get Combeferre to become incoherent. Get Jehan to kiss him!"

"Hey, can you hallucinate to the point where you think your friends are re-enacting the more scandalous bits of Greek philosophical discussion?"

None of them worked, so Joly was just left to feel awkward when Jehan got drunk and started draping himself over people, or whenever Jehan and Combeferre were in a room together. Combeferre had an air of deliberate camaraderie around Jehan for the first few days after Feuilly's debut, as if he was forcing himself to treat Jehan like a sweet little poet who needed a wise medical student to look out for him instead of just doing it automatically. That alone was enough to make Joly think he hadn't been hallucinating. At some point, though, Joly thought Combeferre had decided that Jehan had just been drunk and had no idea what he was doing and had started acting relatively normal. Joly wanted to do the same, but he blamed his mind again. The image was just stuck and poking 'Jehan was drunk' under it was not doing anything to push it out of his thoughts.

"Still suffering from pneumonia?" asked Bossuet, since Joly's usual bright smile was a bit strained and he wasn't drinking.

"No just... I don't know. I'm sure I'm coming down with something." Joly heaved an overdramatic sigh. "I always am!"

Fortunately Courfeyrac came in with Feuilly then, and irritated Feuilly into another rant about Polish serfdom by pressing pastries and brandy on him. Joly wanted to point out that Courfeyrac never thought about showering presents on people, and, in fact, Joly owned several waistcoats that Courfeyrac had bought in various fits of sartorial enthusiasm before realizing that brunets do not always look good in colors more suited to blonds. Generosity was the chief part of Courfeyrac's character. If he liked someone, there were no limits to his unthinking and automatic kindness. He always wanted to be doing something for them, and simply couldn't help himself from doing it. It could occasionally grow overwhelming, but it ought to be taken as a compliment. Whenever Joly tried to open his mouth, however, Feuilly started off on another aspect of the horrors that had befallen Poland and Joly was forced to take another pastry or another sip of brandy so that he didn't just have his mouth hanging open like the slack-jawed idiot he quite felt like he was.

Courfeyrac had discovered, though some trial and error, that he could feed Feuilly when and only when Feuilly was distracted by Poland. Feuilly just took whatever was set in front of him and ate or drank it, just to get it out of the way so he could talk about Poland again. Naturally, this meant that the Amis had learned far more about Poland than they ever cared to know and that Feuilly was starting to look less scrawny. It also meant, however, that if Feuilly went on an extended rant about Poland's history of partitions, he ended up drinking himself under the table.

This was currently the case and, since Grantaire was rambling nonsensically about Enjolras being the Platonic form of virtue and was no longer amusing but rather awkward, the Amis decided to call it a night. Courfeyrac was quite disappointed and, by virtue of looking sorrowfully at them all and pointing out that he couldn't carry Feuilly on his own, and would they really condemn him to walk all the way from the Latin Quarter to wherever it was Feuilly lived, Joly, Bossuet, Jehan and Bahorel all followed Courfeyrac on his journey out of the Latin Quarter into God-alone-knew-where. Joly was too drunk to quite realize where he was going, though he had sobered up considerably after an hour's confused wandering in the less salubrious parts of the city.

They eventually reached a respectable, clearly working class neighbourhood and Feuilly staggered over to a lodging house he appeared to recognize. Once he reached the door he turned back to them and said, "Haven't th'key."

"Did you leave it in the Musain?" asked Courfeyrac, catching Feuilly by the arm before he fell down.

"No, left it 'na book." Feuilly staggered back and threw a pebble at a window five floors up, underneath the roof.

He missed. Quite badly, in fact; he managed to smash one of the glass plates around the flame of the lamp-post Jehan had been staring at in poetic abstraction.

"I'm all for the destruction of governmental property," said Bahorel, who had been clapping his hands over the mouths of any Ami who felt like shouting or singing, "but a little less noise in future, citizen. Perhaps you could wake up one neighbour instead of the whole neighbourhood?"

"Muuuuuuuuuusicheeeeeeeetta," Feuilly caterwauled. "I left my key upstairs!"

A garret window slid open, a candle flared into sputtering life and a pretty, dark-haired woman appeared. She held the candle aloft with one hand and, with the other, held a gray shawl closed around her throat. The candle flame reflected quite interestingly in her dark eyes. "Feuilly?"

"Hi," Feuilly replied.

She stuck her head out the window, her long dark hair tumbling over her shawl-clad shoulder. The ends of her hair swept across the very edge of the sill. "Are you... oh my god, Feuilly! You're drunk!" She burst out laughing. "Oh God, Feuilly, drunk! What, did you ask him to support the efforts of starving Polish potato farmers and give him vodka?"

"What excellent alliteration!" exclaimed Jehan. "Ah fair muse, pray grace us with your presence!"

"No, no, it's Musichetta," she replied, with a quick smile. "Musetta moved out last week and in with what's-his-name, the painter that keeps doing nudes of her. Very reverse Galatea, I thought, though Musetta told me I ought to shut up and would need glasses if I kept reading so much. Well, the bitch can go to hell since she didn't pay her half of the rent before moving out. Feuilly, if you left your key in your room, there's no way I can get to it. We share a stove and a library, not a lock, and I can only fit my arm through the bookshelf even if I take all of the books out of it."

"Left the key in the... in the thing. The book. As a bookmark. The one I was reading. The book I mean, not the bookmark, because I didn't have the bookmark and that was why I was using the key." Feuilly paused and frowned thoughtfully, having realized that he was not quite saying what he wished to say, but also having realized that he no longer had the ability to say anything coherently. He turned to Courfeyrac and, feeling some explanation was in order said, "Stove's on her side of the wall, but there's a... a thing missing in the wall, so there's a gap and I made the gap into a bookshelf, to share, like the stove, only the spines are in my room and the pages in hers. It has books on it. The shelves, not the stove. Be bad if there were books on the stove. Books on the shelf. And my key is in a book on the shelf."

"Which one? I had to sell my copy of Voltaire today, thanks to that bitch Musetta, so if it was in there, it's lost."

"No, 'sin Montesquieu."

Musichetta disappeared from sight but soon reappeared with a book and a key. "Alright, it's here, but I have to point out that the key is up here and you are down there."

"'Sproblem," Feuilly agreed.

"Well, I'm not coming down," said Musichetta. "It's late and I'm not fully dressed."

"Throw it?" suggested Courfeyrac.

Musichetta choked back a laugh. "And I suppose one of you is sober enough to catch it?"

"I don't particularly want to crawl around on the cobblestones," Joly pointed out. "Who knows what sort of miasmas are clinging to them?"

"Ah, fair muse, then we shall rise up to your window on the wings of poetry!" exclaimed Jehan.

"Or," said Joly, "you could take a handkerchief and turn it into a parachute. Just tie a string on each corner and tie the ends of the strings to the key. If you hold the center of the handkerchief and release it, the key  _ought_ to fall slowly enough that one of us will catch it." Joly glanced at those assembled and said, "Er, slowly enough that  _I_ can catch it, then."

How had he ended up the soberest in the group? That was just bizarre. It felt so wrong that Joly unthinkingly put his hand in his coat pocket to find his hand mirror. It was only when he brought it out that he realized checking his tongue would not explain why he was coming out of his rather mild buzz and he felt like an idiot again.

"Hmph, how would that work?" asked Jehan.

"By the manipulation of natural laws against themselves," replied Joly.

"That was remarkably practical of you," said Bahorel. "How did you come up with it, alone, among all of us?"

"Oh who knows? It seemed like common sense to me, but then again, common sense is not so common."

"Bravo, Monsieur Voltaire," said Musichetta, disappearing from the window. A few moments later she returned with the improvised parachute and said, "Right, man being reasonable, must get drunk, but are any of you really irrational enough to be catch this?" She eyed Joly's long scarf with amusement.

Joly tugged it down to smile at her. "I am, alas, quite irrational. As Jehan would put it, I am worshiper of Urizen over Bacchus and blinded by Newton and not wine, even though I'd pick Ampere or Arago over Newton any day. Was that Byron?"

"Yes, in bad translation," she replied, with a laugh. "I'm with you; I'm too nationalistic to prefer the English. Lamartine, Scribe, Hugo, and to crown them all, Madame de Stael! Here, catch, Monsieur Voltaire."

"I hate women because they always know where things are," Joly quoted, reaching out his hands towards the key. It drifted down quite nicely into his open palm, and he looked up to share a smile with the pretty Musichetta. "Nicely done, mademoiselle."

"Can you walk up the stairs by yourself?" Courfeyrac asked Feuilly.

Feuilly protested very indignantly that he wasn't going to rely on the bourgeois element to solve his problems. Bahorel, taking the key from Joly and tucking it into one of the pockets of his flashy red waistcoat, said, "Fortunately for you, my parents are peasants," scooped up Feuilly as he might have once scooped up a sack of grain for the marketplace, and carried him up the stairs.

Courfeyrac wandered back to Joly and somehow managed to dig his elbow into Joly's side.

"Ow, my kidney! When it explodes and I get septic poisoning—"

"Come now, I was not trying to call your attention to your internal organs, but to Musichetta," said Courfeyrac, with a rather roguish grin. "She was flirting with you."

"With me?" asked Joly, rather astonished. He glanced back up at Musichetta, who smiled again and waved at him.

"Good night Monsieur Voltaire. I hope Feuilly hears more of your wisdom in future." Another smile and she was gone.

Joly stood, rather idiotically, staring up at the window, until someone on the third floor opened his window, stuck his head out and informed the Amis that  _some_ people had to work in the morning and would whoever it was singing either kindly shut the hell up or go back to the goddamn Latin Quarter.

Bossuet and Jehan looked rather indignant that there was no appreciation for their version of Mozart's " _Sull'aria… Che soave zeffiretto_ _"_ , but began shambling off in a random direction. Courfeyrac shouted up to Bahorel that they would meet up tomorrow and began weaving his way after the other two, Joly in tow.

"Musichetta seemed rather clever," said Joly, glancing back at the building. "Sharing a library with Feuilly and all, and being up to date on the Romantics."

"You liked her because she called you Monsieur Voltaire," said Bossuet, slinging an arm around Joly's shoulders.

"Perhaps, but there are worse reasons for liking that type of grisette," said Courfeyrac, with the air of an oenophile displaying his knowledge of wines. "I have no doubt she is a mysterious little enchantress, certainly clever, definitely literary, probably dimpled, with a way of pouting that will drive you wild and a maddening way of dancing round flirtation, rarely submitting and always leaving you wanting. In general, one of my favorites for variety's sake, but you occasionally want a little comfort, instead of being continually jolted into the unexpected."

"Oh Courfeyrac, you misinterpret her utterly!" exclaimed Jehan, who had decided to walk backwards, even though he was clearly incapable of doing so. "She is an example of the great brightness of the female soul, polished to a gleaming brilliance through the application of poetry, lifted above the common masses—"

"Oh, don't turn her into a symbol," said Joly, a little nettled. "She's a very literary grisette who apparently had a roommate from hell and has very pretty eyes. I wish you wouldn't keep turning people into symbols it's... hang on, Jehan, is that why you kissed Combeferre?" Joly occasionally got little flashes of insight when he managed to push all the disparate pieces of a problem together and make them work together in watch-like efficiency.

"You kissed Combeferre?" demanded Courfeyrac, stumbling to a halt.

"Well, yes." Jehan executed a wobbly pirouette. "He was upset that Feuilly misunderstood his and Enjolras's intentions, so I showed him that even if the working classes cannot understand the synergy of logic and philosophy in the revolution, the poetic conscience could assure the philosophy that it was acting morally and had its blessing to continue its chosen course."

"... really?" asked Bossuet.

"Jehan, not everyone is going to understand your symbolism," said Joly, quite nettled. "I saw you kiss Combeferre and that was what stuck with me, not that the social conscience of revolution was embracing philosophy and showing the marriage of philosophy and morality at the continued signs of philosophy's humanitarian aims."

"Perhaps  _you_ are too blinded by science to see clearly," replied Jehan, rather snootily, even though he had decided to move from pirouettes to pliés and looked thoroughly stupid.

"That's nonsense. If  _I'm_ blinded by science, then Combeferre's probably had his eyes gouged out by experimenting with the polarization of light."

"Joly, you are the science of the revolution—"

"I... what?"

"—and no one denies that you are a necessary part, just as Bossuet is its wit and Courfeyrac its heart."

"Have you been at the opium again?" asked Courfeyrac. "There is nothing wrong with going for the opium, Prouvaire, but, euh, sometimes you come up with some really... really odd symbolism when you have."

"Odd! I mentioned it to Enjolras and he agreed with me!"

Joly rubbed his nose with the knob of his walking stick. "Jehan, um..." He looked to Bossuet for help.

Bousset said, rather tactfully, "I'm not sure Enjolras is the best person to go to if you want confirmation that your ability to make your friends into symbolic parts of a republic has some basis in reality. Out of all of us here, you are probably best able to understand just how he sees us, but we aren't... actually the Platonic Form versions of Joly, Bossuet and Courfeyrac. We are Joly, Bossuet and Courfeyrac who get too drunk to be reasonable and who laugh at bad puns."

"Perhaps it requires a poet to see you as you are, and not as how you appear to be," replied Jehan, giving up on ballet and deciding to run up to a lamp post, latch onto it and use it to swing around in circles. "When the day of judgment arrives and we each of us are stripped of our fleshy envelopes to rise as pure spirit, clapping for joy as we enter into the truth, you will see that I was right."

"If I'm the science of the revolution," said Joly, "then the revolution is in some danger of flunking out of its midwifery course."

"Take the metaphor too far and we're going to get a revolution with a high infant mortality rate," agreed Bossuet. "I am not entirely sure that is what you want, Jehan. I might also point out that we're all men, so unless you steal from Grantaire and get Enjolras to be intellectually impregnated by Jacobin rhetoric and then somehow give birth to Beauty, Virtue and Wisdom, the revolution is not going to be so much a lasting revolution of society as a few revolutions of the earth around the sun."

Jehan slid off the lamp post and scowled at Bossuet. "Not if we get everyone to enter into their own personal revolutions, and spin like dervishes until they no longer see this world but the next."

"There are other revolutionary groups," pointed out Courfeyrac. "Where do they fit in?"

"There are truths which are not for all men and not for all times," quoted Joly.

"Oh, stop flinging Voltaire at me, or I shall fling Rousseau at you," replied Jehan.

"I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

"Fine! Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being."

The quarrel only degenerated from there. Jehan began mixing up Rousseau with Romantic poets, Joly began reciting laws of electromagnetism and the two of them got into a surprisingly violent argument over the nature of light.

"I'll show you," snapped Jehan. "The symbolic importance of light is infinitely superior to the scientific make-up of it."

Joly blew his nose in polite disbelief.

"It is! It resonates far more with the People than your infra-red polarization nonsense."

"You tell that to Combeferre and--"

"He'd agree with me!"

"Right," said Joly, unconvinced.

"Even--ha, even Musichetta would agree with me! Right, then, I challenge you to an intellectual duel, Jolllly. We'll see whether Musichetta, and thus, the People, appreciates my poetry or your science. The subject is light, the limit is a week."

"I... what?"

However, Jehan had then chosen to stride proudly down the middle of the street reciting the names of the months in the Republican calendar and ignored Joly entirely.

"If I have understood this correctly," said Courfeyrac, "you and Jehan are trying to woo Musichetta with science and poetry respectively." He pushed up his hat to run a hand through his curls. "I hate to say it, Joly, but you have about as much chance of winning this as Bossuet has of winning the lottery."

"I could win the lottery," protested Bossuet, "if the prize was bankruptcy."

"I didn't even agree to this," said Joly, bewildered.

"Don't worry," said Bossuet, patting Joly on the shoulder. "I'll bet on Jehan. That way, he's bound to lose."


	2. Chapter 2

The next day, Joly decided to do the wise thing and go to Combeferre for help. Combeferre was surprised but pleased that Joly had realized that light might possibly be an electromagnetic wave. He spent the morning explaining the scientific advancements in the study of light to the point where Joly, whose knowledge of light had ended at the Enlightenment and included whatever odd bits of knowledge he had picked up from studying electromagnetism, felt able to give lectures on the nature of light and the experiments that had established it.

"That's fascinating," said Joly, as Combeferre demonstrated Arago's spot. "I don't… I don't know. Perhaps I'm just too eager for application to get into all the theories."

"One cannot apply a force without understanding it," replied Combeferre.

"Oh, I suppose that's why you understand Enjolras better than the rest of us," Joly said, with a sudden flash of enlightenment. "He puzzled you when you met him, didn't he? If he did, it would make the rest of us feel better about ourselves, because he  _still_ puzzles us. But you're a good deal wiser than any of the rest of us, so you must have seen that he was going to change the world and you wanted to see how, just like with the wave nature of light."

Combeferre blinked at him. "You really are a surprise sometimes, Joly."

"Just because you don't like how I apply science doesn't mean I cannot apply the scientific method correctly," Joly said, rather nettled. He was immediately sorry for it afterwards. "I… sorry Combeferre. I know it's… you seem to  _know_ everything and when you don't know something and get surprised you get defensive, so I get defensive and it's a horrid mess. If I was Courfeyrac I would fling my arms around you and beg for forgiveness."

"There is nothing to forgive," Combeferre said, quite firmly. "I am not purely a theorist though, Joly. The progress of science must ally itself with the progress of mankind. We may all of us be idealists, but we marry our ideals to reality."

Joly blew his nose so that he would not have to answer. He respected his friends, he would follow Enjolras to the grave, he would march side-by-side with Combeferre against all the forces of hell, but, though he hated himself for it, he often wondered just how they could win against such seemingly insurmountable odds as the Restoration. They all wanted change, yes, they all wanted to fix a society that had come  _so close_ to being cured of all its social ills, but Joly sometimes felt frustrated to the point of tears at trying to realize the utopias Enjolras could conjure up so vividly in his speeches. He envied Combeferre's unshakable assurance, Jehan's fiery flights out of this world and into the next, Courfeyrac's ability to find something to love in even the most broken parts of society, Bahorel's conviction that a well-planned show of force could solve any problem, and even Bossuet's habit of lessening any problem by turning it into a joke.

Joly clung to Bossuet because he could adopt Bossuet's methods. To laugh at something robbed it of its power; to turn a problem into a joke lessened its severity and took away the constant anxiety Joly felt. Joly had been raised with the unspoken understanding that the world was a marvelous place, operating within definable, knowable laws and, if something did not work, it was only a matter of time before someone came along, found a new law or found a new way to apply an old law and solved it. This had never stopped Joly from being anxious about a problem, be it a bad mark from his tutor to consumption to socio-economic disparity, but it had kept his anxiety to manageable levels. There were problems, but someone, perhaps even him, Joly, would fix them. It was only a matter of time and experimentation.

"Does Jehan?" Joly asked curiously.

"Does Jehan marry his ideals to reality? Er, I think he tries to escape from reality because he understands it and it either disgusts him or holds no interest for him."

Joly did not quite know how to bring it up, but he said, "I think he, euh…." How ought he to phrase it? He decided to kiss you out of convoluted symbolism? "He sees life through a poetic perspective and rejects all other interpretations. I wouldn't speculate as to why, I'm not qualified, but, he, um… has a line of logic that is… idiosyncratic."

Combeferre looked at Joly in polite bewilderment. "I… suppose so? Joly, are you trying to get at something? Disguise of any sort ill-suits you. We are both scientists, we both chase after the truth with too much conviction to be comfortable with half-lies and insinuation."

Joly rubbed his nose with the knob of his walking stick. "I saw Jehan kiss you the other day. I asked Jehan about it," Joly said hurriedly, as Combeferre turned red and began fiddling with his glasses, "and it was deeply symbolic to him, that's all, it's wasn't… I do not believe he meant anything other than to reassure you that you were morally in the right, but it… he doesn't allow for different interpretations."

Combeferre was still quite red. "I, er, no. He is like Enjolras in that respect. They neither of them mean to do it, but sometimes they, ah, forget about negative capability… that is not to say that Enjolras is incapable of holding two opposing thoughts in his mind, or that he is incapable of applying his ideals as we would apply, say, Ampere's theories on electromagnetism. It is only that he can get caught up in theory. There is nothing wrong with it, because he knows how to apply it. He can study the trends of our society like any scientist and steer them to a higher goal, towards a republic."

"One turns natural laws against themselves, for one's use," said Joly.

"Yes, like with a hot air balloon. We study nature and adapt it to our purpose."

Jehan came in then, to take Combeferre to lunch, and informed Joly that  _he_ had spent the morning composing a poem, which Musichetta already ought to be reading.

"Do I want to know exactly what the two of you are doing?" asked Combeferre.

"Probably not," said Joly. "You'll only be disappointed in the misapplication of science. Oh, Jehan,  _do_ tell Combeferre what you think of Arago's theories about the polarization of light."

Jehan did, much to Combeferre's distress, and Joly slipped off back home to plan his first move and to alarm his landlady.

The next day, Joly, by virtue of inappropriate behavior in his chem. lab (i.e. Joly tried to scientifically prove a point about the salubrious effects of nitrous oxide on the human body and literally caused the professor to leave the room laughing hysterically), managed get out of class in time to tag along with Courfeyrac to go find Feuilly. Courfeyrac looked askance at Joly's packages, but decided it was one of Joly's more kooky homeopathic remedies against illness and plunged blindly out of the Latin Quarter to find Feuilly. Joly took advantage of the resultant confusion (Courfeyrac, much to his surprise, could not remember how he had found Feuilly's building), to duck into several bookstores and ask for both directions and if any dark-haired woman had recently sold a copy of Voltaire. At the third bookstore, he had a marvelous stroke of luck and found one slim volume of  _Candide_ with the inscription, 'To Musichetta- you ought to have one of the copies you stitched this winter, Love, Papa' and bought it.

Though they did not find Feuilly's apartment, they did manage to find Feuilly's atelier and catch him on his way home.

"You have to come to dinner with us!" Courfeyrac exclaimed, upon seeing Feuilly. "I don't quite understand the full extent of Napoleon's involvement in the Dutchy of Warsaw."

Feuilly opened his mouth to protest, closed it and, glancing around to make sure none of his coworkers saw him humoring overenthusiastic republican students, said, "Alright, fine, but I have to drop off my paint box back at home."

"Lovely!" exclaimed Courfeyrac. "We can kidnap you for the evening. Oh, do let us?" He added to this a particularly disarming smile and Feuilly, caught off-guard, could not help but agree.

Joly was more than happy to accompany Feuilly back to his apartment building and even offered to carry Feuilly's paint box, though Feuilly refused rather curtly and, for a change of pace, ranted a bit about the Greek war of independence and how Byron, the bastard, stole attention away from the real problems that fueled the war and all the common men who died for their country. Once they arrived at the building, Feuilly begged Joly and Courfeyrac not to embarrass him and to behave themselves while he went to wash his hands and put his things away.

Courfeyrac agreed very solemnly, with every intention of behaving until he forgot that it was necessary to do so, as he undoubtedly would. "We shall wait here and… Jolllly, what are you doing?"

As soon as Feuilly had entered the building, Joly had sat down on the curb and, putting his largest package to the side, begun to take various packages out of his pockets. "Science."

"You are doing science," Courfeyrac repeated.

"Mm-hm. Here, can you hold this for me?"

Courfeyrac was bemused, but did as bid, watching Joly as he carefully wrapped the copy of  _Candide_  in cloth and began tying it to the large, silk bag Courfeyrac was holding, so that the book dangled underneath a large metal cup.

"Might I ask what specific sort of science you hope to display?" asked Courfeyrac, as Joly pulled out a flask and began carefully pouring its contents into the metal cup.

"Physics," said Joly. "Technically, it is not light, as Jehan specified, but it is still science. Combeferre mentioned it. Damn, I forgot the bit of fabric… ah, here it is." He carefully put it into the cup of alcohol. "Now, this  _should_ work. I tried it with my copy of a selection of Voltaire's letters at home and it worked, and it's much heavier than  _Candide_."

"If Jehan protests, we can argue that it is _light_ hearted," said Courfeyrac.

"It also has to do with heat, which is a property of light," said Joly, taking out a lucifer and lighting it against the sole of his boot. "Hold the bag out from you. I want to set the little bit of cloth on fire, not the whole balloon itself."

Courfeyrac stretched his arms, Joly lit the bit of alcohol-soaked cloth, and the two of them watched the silk sack expand.

"I am going to feel extremely stupid if she is out for the evening," Joly said. "I wish I'd thought of that before it started inflating."

"Oi, Feuilly!" Courfeyrac shouted.

Feuilly stuck his head out the window, scowling. "Keep it down, will you? This is a respectable neighborhood and… what the hell?" He stared at the hot air balloon inflating in front of Courfeyrac.

"Just knock on the wall and ask Musichetta to look out," Courfeyrac said.

Feuilly ducked back into his room and, a moment later, both Musichetta and Feuilly returned to lean over the sills and watch Courfeyrac release the balloon. Joly, holding onto its tether, watched its progress quite anxiously, but it rose up and drifted to Musichetta's window, much to the confusion of her neighbors below.

Musichetta let out a startled laugh and, when the balloon had risen to her eye level, looked down. "Ah, Monsieur Voltaire. What's this?"

"The manipulation of natural laws," said Joly, with a bow. "And my compliments."

Musichetta stared down at him somewhat incredulously, a smile playing around the corners of her lips. "Then they are accepted."

"Grab the tether, if you can reach it," said Joly, walking towards the building. "There's a package for you underneath and you probably ought to take it off before it falls. I tested it at home, but this book is smaller and the strings are closer to cup, so I'm not sure if the metal will heat up enough to burn through the strings."

"You know, you could have just walked up the stairs, or asked Feuilly to give me something," she pointed out.

"… yes, but this was rather more fun, wasn't it?"

He was rewarded with a bright, lovely laugh. "I suppose so. I… Feuilly, it's closer to you—thank you." She pulled the balloon closer to her and somehow or other managed to untie the package and bring it into her room without a. setting the building on fire or b. puncturing the balloon. "Let me… oh! You… oh!" In some confusion, Musichetta released the balloon and slammed her window shut.

"Got a weird sort of caller, don't she?" asked one of the tenants, shutting his window.

"I begin to think that you have a chance," said Courfeyrac, grabbing the tether before the balloon floated away.

"Well, one never knows the veracity of a hypothesis until one has tested it," said Joly, quite modestly. "However, euh… I rather counted on Musichetta keeping the hot air balloon. I'm not sure what to do with it."

Courfeyrac glanced up at the balloon, bobbing merrily with the air currents. "I'll keep it if you like, but it's going to look odd as we walk back to the Latin Quarter."

"Rather."

Fortunately, Musichetta appeared at the door, out of breath and blushing, clutching her book to her chest. Joly was quite impressed. No other girl he knew could pull off the hideously full sleeves in vogue, or could manage to make the top-knot and face-framing curls coming into fashion look half-way decent. Her hairstyle was a slightly more practical variant that did not involve hair-rats and merely drew attention to her fine eyes. Musichetta also had the loveliest eyes he had ever seen. They were sort of hazel, but only to the point where one stared into them, expecting to see a hint of green, without seeing said hint until she smiled. It made one rather desperate to make her smile. "I… I realize we don't know each other's names. Musichetta- I'm Musichetta Poquelin."

Joly took off his hat and bowed. "Marcel Joly. Most people call me Jolllly, however."

"Jolllly?" She half-smiled as she said it, rolling around the 'l's as if she was savoring a mouthful of wine.

"Exactly so, Mademoiselle Poquelin."

"Are you a scientist then?"

Joly stuck his hat back on his head. "Alas, only a medical student with pretentions to scientific knowledge. Physics isn't really my forte, though; I like electromagnetism."

"Really? I know next to nothing about it, except that Arago did something with it that got him a spot in some Swedish Academy."

Joly offered her a quick bright smile, ignoring the prods in the back Courfeyrac was giving him as encouragement. "The polarization of light, I think. Or… oh, the Arago spot! I think I can show you. It's remarkably sunny today. Combeferre, he's really the scientist among my friends, demonstrated it to me this morning… ah, here we are." He pulled out the mirror with which he liked to examine his tongue and looked around. "The… hm, I suppose my watch would work. Right, so…." Joly angled the mirror until he managed to refract a beam of sunlight towards his watch. "Right, look very closely at the watch shadow on the wall. Er, once it's still, I mean."

Musichetta did so. "And I'm supposed to… hang on, there's something wrong with your watch. There's a…."

"There's a spot of light," Joly said triumphantly. "In the middle of the shadow. It's small and its faint, but it's there. My watch is solid, so there's no chance of the light shining through it."

Musichetta's look of surprise and admiration made Joly feel quite a lot better for having nearly failed his midwifery midterm a few weeks ago. He actually felt quite clever. "What did you call it?"

"Arago's spot. Or, technically it's Poisson's, but that's only because Poisson theorized about it. I call it Arago's because he proved it."

Musichetta looked at him curiously and Joly, feeling a sudden upswing of self-confidence in being thought intelligent instead of eccentric or slightly deranged by too much science (as was the opinion of his mother), decided he ought to explain. "It's rather a funny story, actually. No one's really certain whether light's a wave or a particle. I wouldn't be surprised if there were duels over whether it's one or the other. Fresnel submitted this paper to the Academy about the diffraction of light, to prove that it's a wave. I read it, it's a brilliant paper, but one of the judges, Poisson, was utterly convinced that light's made up of particles so he pushed Fresnel's theory of the diffraction of light to its most extreme conclusion. If light was a wave it should act like… like water does. When water heads towards, say, a rock, it goes around the sides of the rock to meet up again at the back. Therefore, if light was a wave, it ought to go around a solid object and meet up at a point in the back. Arago, the hero that he is, immediately tested the theory and proved it right. There's a spot of light in the shadow of a circular object, so light diffracts and thus acts like a wave. Arago's brilliant, though. He discovered rotary magnetism and the polarization of light."

"Perhaps…." Musichetta was smiling and her eyes had such a lovely hint of green in them Joly couldn't look away. "Perhaps you could show me that tomorrow?"

Courfeyrac elbowed Joly in the side and Joly just managed to ignore both him, and the thought that he was going to have a bruise tomorrow.

"I, euh, yes, delighted, euh s-same time, euh s-same place?" Joly stammered.

"Yes," said Musichetta. She hesitated a moment, tightening her fingers around her book and said, with a sudden, rather saucy smile, "I might even let you come up, if the experiment is worth my while."

"I think it is," Joly said, starting to blush himself.

"It is," Courfeyrac assured Musichetta, with one of his dazzling smiles. He draped his free arm around Joly's shoulders. "Joly will be here tomorrow, Mademoiselle Poquelin, and it will certainly be worth it."

Musichetta grinned, which made Joly's higher mental processes suddenly shut off, and said, "Until tomorrow, then, Monsieur Jolllly." She disappeared into the building with a swish of printed cotton and a crinkle of petticoats. Why was he thinking of petticoats, Joly asked himself, and then, upon receiving a rather pointed mental image, decided to redirect his confusion at someone else.

"Courfeyrac, why did you say that?" Joly asked wretchedly. "I don't know anything about the polarization of light except what Combeferre told me. If you asked me about Hahnemann's theories of magnetic homeopathy, yes, fine, or even Ampere's work or Galvani's, but I'm not familiar with Arago's theories on light! I just know the ones about electromagnetism. You know, everything can be magnetized, rotary magnetism- which doesn't have  _anything_ to do with light! And, anyway, I only know Arago and Fresnel and I don't know anything about Fresnel except that he annoyed all the rest of the light theorists by being right. Jehan has put me at a damned disadvantage and you're not helping."

"Joly, you haven't had a mistress since last semester," Courfeyrac pointed out. "I have your best interests in mind here. She'll shock you out of any fit of sulky hypochondria, you'll give her an entry into the intellectual world she clearly wishes to penetrate, if you will forgive the turn of phrase, and it is becoming increasingly obvious she'd rather see you naked than Jehan. Besides, you need all the help you can get. For God's sake, you're showing her the wave nature of light to court her."

"It's not hypochondria," Joly insisted, in lieu of protesting anything else. "I really do think my spleen is going to explode. I saw an exploded spleen in the corpse we had to dissect for class two days ago."

"Right."

Feuilly walked out of the apartment building and eyed Joly suspiciously. "You're an odd one, aren't you?"

"Oh, are you just noticing that?" asked Joly, a little wryly. "I've always gotten 'eccentric', so that might be more apt. Oh, and we've still got the hot air balloon."

"I suppose it's mine then," said Courfeyrac. "Thanks, Joly. I, er… it's a present no one else would have thought to get me. I will not be able to help but think of you every time I see it."

Joly sulked all the way to the Latin Quarter, the hot-air balloon drifting determinedly over-head. The only thing that cheered him was learning the next day that Jehan was in bed with a cold, because he had decided to play his flute outside of Musichetta's window at two in the morning and her neighbors had thought it justifiable to dampen the flames of his ardor by throwing water at him. Jehan had then wandered, damp and sniffling, through the miasmas of Paris and had lost his voice and his ability to breathe through his nose.

According to Combeferre, who had told Joly all of this accompanied by the Glasses Polish of Serious Disapproval, Jehan was now writing overdramatic poems about his impending death, and the rejection and eventual demise of poetry, however so divinely inspired by the natural radiance of the intellectually polished soul of the People, by those too wrapped up in Newton's sleep to appreciate the sound of a soul in love. Joly changed the subject to Arago's spot and Combeferre's glee that someone else cared about the wave nature of light drove out any lingering doubts about Joly's misapplication of scientific principles. He even let Joly borrow his polariscope, as long as Joly swore to return it in perfect condition.

The next day Joly paid next to no attention in any of his classes, and startled all of his friends by asking them about the polarization of light. They were used to thinking of Joly as that cheerful hypochondriac obsessed with magnetism who one asked for help with diagnosing or treating diseases because he had thought he had come down with them all. The other medical students were alternately amused and startled that Joly had suddenly developed new interests beyond his health, magnets, and that slacker law student with whom he always made bad puns.

Joly protested that that was a singular view, particularly since it wasn't true as he had gone two days without seeing Bossuet, one of his lab partners pointed out that Joly was a singular person, and, much to the amusement of everyone else loitering in front of the medical school, Joly explained the Rousseau-Voltaire, science-poetry duel with a bohemian poet friend of his, and was offered the loan of a telescope.

"Gives you an excuse to see her at night," said the medical student with the telescope, winking. "Wait a couple of days. It'll be cold then, and you can gallantly offer to share a blanket. Or just put an arm around her to keep her warm."

"You might scare her off then," said another medical student, lighting a cigar. "Did that once and got a black eye for my trouble. I failed that damn brain dissection because I couldn't see out of one eye. Is she a puncher?"

"How could he possibly know?" asked the medical student with the telescope.

"Easy to tell," insisted the other medical student, blowing a cloud of smoke into his compatriot's face. "What are her hands like?"

"Small," said Joly. "Rather delicate looking for a grisette, really. She is extraordinarily lovely."

"Arms?" asked the smoker.

"Euh? I couldn't tell. She was wearing one of those poufy-sleeved things. I don't know why they're in fashion."

"Were the sleeves really big?" asked the smoker, and, at Joly's confirmation, he gnawed thoughtfully on the end of his cigar. "Well, damn. She's probably hiding biceps the size of ham hocks. Maybe you'd better just offer her your coat instead."

"Oh dear," said Joly, rather taken aback.

"Only warn you so that we science-y fellows can win," said the smoker, not unkindly. "I mean, God damn, you're in school year-round, training for a job that's going to kill you and then in waltzes some snooty aristo who doesn't need a job and who can toss off a couplet whenever he feels like it. Who does the grisette go for?"

"You're exaggerating," said the amateur astronomer. "Science can break the boundaries of common perception as much as poetry."

"Yeah? Next time a grisette starts fishing for compliments and you tell her the names of all the bones in her hand instead of comparing them to Helen of Troy's, you see what happens."

Joly thus headed off to Musichetta's apartment with some trepidation. The land-lady allowed him in, once Joly had explained that he was a medical student, he was not going to blow anything up and he was not going to be making any more noise than was necessary.

"Better you than some of the ones Musetta brought in," said the land-lady, eyeing the thick, well-cut fabric of Joly's coat. "Ain't a Bohemian, are you?"

"I am often criticized for not being one," said Joly. "It is a difficult thing to be a realist in an age of Romanticism. All this emotion over reason business makes me profoundly uneasy."

This was enough to win the land-lady's approval, particularly since Joly then listened to a rant about how she wasn't one to dictate morals, but those goddamned bohemians Musetta brought in simply weren't  _decent_ , really, and this was a good, respectable house and didn't need Romantic flute concertos at two in the morning. Of course, he had to listen—the land-lady was showing him up the stairs—but Joly was smiling at the thought of seeing Musichetta and the lady-lady was gratified to think that Joly shared her opinions.

"You're welcome to come in, but I have a crack in the wall I need to fix before asking any other girls over to see if they want to share lodgings," said Musichetta, opening the door and smiling at him. She was dressed rather simply, in a belted gray gown with rather modest poufs around the shoulder, and longer, form-fitting sleeves that extended to the wrist and proved that she did  _not_ have biceps the size of ham hocks. "I can thank Musetta for that again. When she asked to have the room for the evening in exchange for her part of the rent, I thought she was just going to collect her things and cheat on her artist for old times' sake. I had no idea that, when I returned the next morning, she would have two lovers struggling to stab each other  _Corsair_ style."

"Are you alright?" asked Joly, alarmed.

"Me? Yes, fine. I was more worried for my books. Neither of her lovers had ever held a knife except at the dinner table and they somehow embedded their oriental dagger into the wall." She gestured at a jagged tear in the wallpaper and plaster high on the wall, by the doorframe. "Oriental daggers are surprisingly sharp. They couldn't get it out, they just dragged it around inside the wall for a bit, until Feuilly started pounding on the bookshelf and telling them to shut up and stop ripping apart the fabric of working class society, the self-absorbed, self-righteous bourgeois bastards playing at poverty that they were."

"Can I be of any assistance?" asked Joly, taking off his hat and looking around awkwardly for a place to put it. Musichetta's one-room apartment was neat and well-organized but rather sparsely furnished. There were two beds on either side of the stove, with a cupboard, a table and two chairs against the opposite wall. There was a bookshelf, or rather, several books balanced on a plank jammed into a hole in the wall, between one of the beds and the window, and a large traveling chest in front of the bookshelf.

Musichetta took his hat, walking stick and polariscope and stuck them on the table, next to a bowl full of what looked like plaster. "You can hold the chair for me while I put up some plaster of Paris and hope for the best." She said this with such a sweet smile that Joly immediately did as bid, and dragged the sturdier of the two chairs up to the wall.

"So, where did you get your fascination with science, Monsieur Jolllly?" asked Musichetta, climbing up on her chair with the bowl and a palette knife.

Joly held the back of the chair and admired Musichetta's ankles. Well, he couldn't help it. She was on a chair, reaching her arms up and the hem of her dress rose. It seemed rude  _not_  to admire her ankles. "I am not entirely sure. I think I've always had it. My grandfather was a watchmaker, so there was no chance of my father being anything but a watchmaker Deist, and, since my father went to work in Paris just before the Revolution, he got sucked into the Enlightenment. My father was in charge of my education when I was younger, and he liked science, so here I am, spouting off electromagnetic equations when I ought to be listing the bones in the human body."

"You said your father came to Paris just before the Revolution?" Musichetta asked,

"I'm the youngest of six," explained Joly. "That and my father married late, after some less-than-entirely-legal maneuverings during the Directory got him a fortune. He fancies himself quite the political manipulator, since he's been a functionnaire in the Loire valley since '93, but, as dearly as I love him, I can admit that he is no Talleyrand, he's just good with paperwork."

"Oh, that doesn't match up the stories I've been telling myself about you," said Musichetta, glancing down at him, the green glint in her eyes just barely discernable. "I had it that you were from the Vendee, with a father who grew up hating the Whites and their shackles of superstition and ended up an Egyptologist under Bonaparte. You were born there and thus, though fair—" she put the palette knife in the bowl and lightly touched his blond head with her fingertips "—cannot stand the cold of Paris."

"I do have family in the Vendee, but it's not a happy story," said Joly, trying not to give into the stuck thought of, ' _she likes my hair, yes!_ ' "My grandfather was a watchmaker, I think I told you, who used to be a sergeant in the Flanders's Regiment and ended up a commander of a coast band of Whites. My father's younger brother had also been to Paris, turned Jacobin and fought for the Blues. My grandfather ended up locking my uncle up and, ah… killed him."

"My father was one of the traveling printers with Bonaparte's armies," said Musichetta, smoothing out the plaster quite carefully. "The Restoration was not kind to him."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Joly said, with a wince. "I imagine not. Did he settle in Paris?"

"No, Lyons. My mother has some family there."

"You don't have an accent at all."

"No, I've been in Paris for years now. Around Byron's death, my father got thrown in prison for some censorship charge no one ever bothered to explain to my family. I have one older sister, two younger ones and a slew of younger brothers. There wasn't any way all of us could survive in Lyons unless we went into the factory. I thought I'd rather die, so I ran off with a journeyman printer, now God knows where, and here I am." She gestured at the room, with a wry little smile. "I was lucky; my father still has printer friends in Paris. When I run out of petticoats to sew, they let me stitch together books. I get to read and I get to be paid for it, as long as I'm careful."

Joly made a mental note never to introduce her to Combeferre. Combeferre was a perfectly nice fellow, but to introduce him to a literate grisette interested in the polarization of light would just be asking for more competition.

"Besides, when I sew I stare out the window and make up stories about the people who pass by, anyways."

"Do you often tell yourself stories about people?"

"It gets me through the day," replied Musichetta. "Paris is so gray, you have to find color somewhere, and if it's in your imagination, so much the better. It doesn't cost anything. Besides, sometimes it's necessary. When that bitch Musetta was living here I had to narrate everything in my head as if it was just some farce of Moliere's or I would have pushed her out the window months ago."

Joly laughed and said that Musetta sounded a bit like one of his sisters, who made the motion of spilled mercury look coolly rational. Since Joly and Musichetta were both from large families, they derived a genuine enjoyment from complaining about their siblings, praising the merits of a room of one's own, and the odd moments of loneliness that came when one is away from continual argument, incomprehensible rivalries and anyone who understood unfunny private jokes. They talked of only general subjects, to sound out similarities and to fleetingly compare differences, until said differences were either accepted or resolved, and Musichetta, though forcing him out the door before the neighbors got suspicious, invited him to come back with the polariscope tomorrow.

The next day, they shared stories in between studying polarization, the next, confidences while waiting for it to be dark enough for astronomy. Joly admitted that he was quite terrified of disease, and that was, oddly, why he had chosen to go into medicine. He wanted to understand and control what might kill him. Musichetta admitted that her mother was half-gypsy and, more out of necessity than Romantic nonconformity, she sometimes told fortunes to tourists outside of Notre Dame.

"I suppose your ability to make up stories about people comes in handy, then," Joly said, with a quick, bright smile to let her know it didn't matter to him.

"All the time. You just make up something happy, based on a framework the cards give you and whatever you can pick up by looking at your client, and there you go."

"No wonder you picked up the scientific method so quickly," said Joly, topping off her glass of wine, because she had, after about a half-hour of persuasion and flinging around Moliere quotes, allowed him to take her to dinner at a café near the Observatoire before they went star-gazing. He thus hadn't done his homework in a week, but, according to Bossuet, that was why God had created Sunday nights. "You've been doing it unknowingly for years."

"Mm?" She glanced over the rim of her wineglass. She really did have beautiful eyes.

"I, euh… I mean, you've been applying a sort of scientific method for years. You study a situation, note down any interesting observable details and come up with a provable hypothesis."

Musichetta laughed, and Joly could see the green glint in her eyes. She had the eyes of a fortune teller, which really must have helped her vis-à-vis the tourists by Notre Dame. "If you want to phrase it like that, I suppose it works. I never thought women were much for the sciences."

"Ah, you like Voltaire and you don't know the Marquise du Chatalet!" Joly exclaimed.

"She sounds familiar…?"

Joly rubbed his nose with the knob of his walking stick. "She was brilliant. I studied her translation of Newton. It's apparently better than de Nerval's translations of Goethe, since she fixed all the errors Newton made when writing his laws. She and Voltaire were living together outside of Paris and competing for the same prize at the Academy, on the nature of light and fire. She discovered that light is mass-less and that there's a whole other part of light that we can't see but which has a temperature, and she was doing these experiments on her own, since Voltaire was busy imprecisely heating metals."

Musichetta was smiling at him in a way that made Joly feel exceptionally clever instead of like an eccentric. "I'd like to see her experiments."

"Well, we can conduct the light experiment… ah, tomorrow? I'm not sure if I can get all the materials together, but I can try and the light in your room is excellent in the afternoons."

"You are amazingly sweet," said Musichetta, "and, in an odd sort of way, you're just as Romantic as any of Musetta's callers."

Joly pulled a face. "Ah, and here I've been trying to avoid being infected with Romanticism. I always have bad luck with my health though; every bad wind blows me into influenza. I suppose I'm as susceptible to the zeitgeist as everyone else."

Musichetta laughed. "No, I only meant that you… there's an enthusiasm about you that's remarkably endearing, Monsieur Voltaire. That and… I don't want to call you unworldly and offend you, but you don't seem… well, it's as if you see the way the world ought to work while you're looking at the way it does, and it's really charming how you want to show its ideal state to everyone."

"Idealism is infectious in Paris, too," said Joly. "Do you have any political opinions?"

"Any government with a free press would earn my vote, if women ever managed to get one. I'm not sure what I'd do with a vote though. It seems like such an odd thing to want."

"It's the practical application of an ideal," replied Joly. "It's a wonderful thing to say that you want all men or all men and women to be equal, but how does one demonstrate that, or institute it? I've a friend, Combeferre, who insists that it's universal education rather than universal suffrage that will free us all and I rather believe him. If everyone just got a chance to see what the world could be like, or a chance to see if they're a second du Chatalet… I mean, you're picking up on the scientific nature of light faster than some of the students I sit next to in class every day. There are rules to society just as there are rules to nature, but, unlike the laws of nature, the laws of society are so… arbitrary. There's no logic to them. There aren't any universal principles. You cannot apply the same laws and get the same results. I think there are natural laws for human beings as well as for light or electromagnetism, but why we ignore them and insist that someone with a title is more deserving of medical care than someone without one when, inside, everyone's got the same bits and pieces…." Joly trailed off, as Musichetta was looking at him with an odd expression. "Euh, please forgive me. I can get overenthusiastic."

"No, I think it's charming," replied Musichetta, with a smile that made Joly blush. "Do you really believe all that?"

Joly rubbed his nose with the knob of his walking stick. "I do. My uncle, the one who turned Jacobin, died for all that. I was named after him and, as my father always told me, take after him almost spookily."

They moved on to other topics and, eventually, to star-gazing, but Musichetta kept looking at him oddly whenever she thought he wasn't paying attention. Joly began to be seriously worried that he had made some kind of horrible blunder, and, Grantaire-like, babbled somewhat incoherently about Greek mythology. This served as a suitable subject of conversation. Musichetta liked mythology and they laughed at the old gods and goddesses until Joly felt calm again.

"By the by," asked Joly, draping his overcoat around Musichetta's shoulders, after three or four unsuccessful offers and attempts to put an arm around her waist, "your landlady mentioned a flute solo at two in the morning?"

Musichetta turned to smile at him. Her cheek and the ends of her face-framing curls brushed the back of Joly's hand. ' _Dear God, she's beautiful_ ,' Joly thought. ' _I will drink myself into a coma if Jehan wins her over_.'

"Oh, him. I thought he was one of Musetta's, at first. He is a sweet little thing, isn't he? He keeps sending me very long and very incomprehensible poems and standing outside of my window and sniffling forlornly. He tries to recite poetry, but he's lost his voice. I just want to wrap him up in blankets and spoon-feed him soup."

Joly was smitten. If he started sniffling, she'd feed him soup! Oh, she wouldn't mind his horrific health in the slightest—of course, her tender heart was now going out to Jehan, which was not the way it ought to work and did Joly no good what-so-ever. "Oh, euh, do you?"

Musichetta smiled wickedly. "Well, that's only one thing I'd like to do to him."

Joly did not know exactly how to interpret this and so sulked until Musichetta slipped her hand in his (on the pretext that she had forgotten her gloves; she only allowed Joly liberties when he had given up trying to take them) and told him, in strictest confidence, that her landlady was right and, as sweet as her poet was, he insisted on playing the flute when he clearly did not know how to do so and ought to have basins of water dumped on him whenever he tried to play.

"His poems are… interesting though. I've never had anyone write a poem about me before. Would you like to come up and read one of them after this?"

Since Musichetta was holding his hand, Joly could not deny her anything and so agreed to come up to her apartment and inwardly seethe with jealousy. Really, thought Joly, rather petulantly, it wasn't fair of Jehan to look pathetic and ill  _and_ to write poetry.


	3. Chapter 3

Once Joly arrived in Musichetta's apartment, he began to think that the whole come-upstairs-and-read-creepy-apocalyptic-poetry idea was really just a pretext for something far more interesting. He formed this impression when, after Musichetta had lit several candles, she very playfully took the ends of his scarf in either hand and said, "The color brings out your eyes marvelously, but why not take it off and stay—"

Feuilly banged on the wall.

"Ignore that," said Musichetta. Joly was very happy to do so, and put his arms around her waist, with a quizzical half smile. She did not protest.

Feuilly, however, did.

" _Musichetta_."

"Go to hell, Feuilly!"

He did not. He stuck his head through the bookshelf instead. "Oi,  _Musichetta."_

"Feuilly, Musetta doesn't live here anymore. This is no longer hell. Get your head out of my room."

"So this is stargazing is it?" Feuilly asked, looking pointedly at Joly, who removed his arms from around Musichetta's waist.

"We went to the Observatoire earlier," said Musichetta.

Joly picked up the telescope case from where he had put it on the floor. "We're high enough up—I think you can at least see the moon from here. Would you like to borrow this?"

Feuilly looked extremely tempted. "Ah…."

"Yes, take it back to your room," said Musichetta, taking the case from Joly and pointedly putting it on the bookshelf.

"No, you need it," replied Feuilly. "Just point it at the street rather than the sky."

"What?"

"Your poet's come back again."

"Oh, has he?" Musichetta unlatched the window and peered out, one hand resting on the sill. "He… oh my God. What is he doing?"

"Handstands," replied Feuilly.

Then, Musichetta said, with utmost horror, " _What the hell is he wearing_?"

Joly looked over Musichetta's shoulder. In a fit of Romantic nonconformity, Jehan had decided that he was going to dress like a Turkish sultan. Why he had chosen to interpret this as a much-too small vest of hideous purple brocade with orange piping and red buttons, a pair of truly awful yellow trousers much too big for him and tied oddly at the ankle, so that the hems of his trousers flared out, no cravat or coat, and a lump of fabric tied to his head in what Joly thought was supposed to be a turban, was one of those grand mysteries of life, like is light a wave or a particle, or how does Grantaire know to show up every time someone opens a bottle of brandy?

"He wore a perfectly respectable overcoat yesterday and the day before," said Musichetta, transfixed by the sight of the vest. "I mean, a decade out of fashion, but well-cut, black not… does he dress like this all the time?"

"That's the worst I've ever seen him," said Feuilly, eyeing the telescope case. "Are you going to set that thing up?"

"Might as well," Joly said gloomily. He took the telescope out of its case and began to set it up by the window, in the vague hope of either distracting Musichetta, or providing a reason not to look at Jehan's latest fashion disaster.

Musichetta stared at Jehan, utterly transfixed. "It… oh, it just gets  _worse_ the longer I look at it. Jolllly, you know him?"

"Euh, yes, he's a friend of mine. His name's Jean Prouvaire, but he went through a fit of medievalism in the middle of the semester and asked everyone to start calling him Jehan."

"Oh God. He was dressed up like Mozart when he played the flute, but I thought it was just a costume. You mean he goes out in  _public_ dressed like that? He wears…  _that_ to class?"

"Well, not the turban," said Joly, adjusting the legs of the stand.

Musichetta collapsed into a chair. "He's a bohemian. Oh God. And an Orientalist at that." She looked over at her wall; the ravages of an unfortunate fit of Romanticism could still be seen beneath the plaster. "Oh no."

"He's got an oriental disemboweling knife tied to his waist, too," said Feuilly, coming in. "Citizen Joly, is he drunk?"

"Sometimes it's hard to tell," Joly said, honestly. "He's not really a bohemian, though; he doesn't live in voluntary poverty."

"So you mean he actually pays for those… clothes?" Musichetta asked, looking at Joly with such horror Joly coughed to avoid answering the question straight away. "He doesn't have to buy things second hand? He actually  _chose_ to buy that vest? He actually made someone sew it?"

"Ah… it seems like it."

Musichetta groaned and buried her face in her hands. "A bohemian! I thought I was done with them! Oh no, it's  _nothing_ to throw your sewing scissors out the window, just because they felt like it, or to start singing arias when you're hung over and just want to sleep on a Saturday morning, or to take your curling iron with them overnight because property ownership is just a stuffy bourgeoisie notion, or to set your copy of  _Don Juan_ on fire because they really wanted it to be full of  _incendiary_ wit!"

"I take it Musetta was a bohemian," said Joly, screwing the telescope in place.

Musichetta gave a hollow laugh and looked up. "Oh, you don't know the half of it. I like a bit of fun, and I'd say I'm adventurous enough but you ought to at least  _warn_ a girl before you decide to have a naked string quartet in your  _shared_ apartment. What the hell was she going to do with four men anyways? Two I understand, two I approve of, but  _four_? And one of them was old and fat and just… ugh! I never needed to see him playing at Adam before the fall."

"How did she not get kicked out of here?" asked Feuilly, eyeing Jehan with the air of someone trying to figure out the cause of a massive carriage pile-up.

"She always had someone paying her rent," Musichetta replied. "The landlady grumbled, but as long as Musetta kept paying, it didn't matter. We were up in the garret and weren't going to bother the first-floor tenants. Oh God, I need a drink." She went to the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of gin and three cups.

"I think that he realized you're home now," said Feuilly, who was still staring out the window.

Musichetta tossed back of cup of gin. "I don't want to see this. I just  _don't._ It was bad enough when he was across the street—"

"The violet brocade sort of gleams in the lamplight," said Feuilly. "It's like looking at an oil spill, almost. Is Citizen Prouvaire color-blind, do you think?"

Musichetta dazedly gave each of them a cup, without thinking to fill them first, and went to hide her head under a pillow. "First time I get  _poetry_ in my honor and he has to be a  _bohemian._ "

Joly took out his flask of brandy and served them all, since Musichetta was too busy hiding from Jehan's bizarre wardrobe to share the gin. "As someone who is going to be a doctor, I advise a little medicinal brandy. It's the only way you're going to make the vest slightly less awful. It's… I don't know what Jehan was thinking. I'm not sure if he  _was_ thinking. This is one of the oddest things he's ever done, and he's done some odd things before."

"Such as?"

"Euh… he dragged me into the catacombs once, so he could get a skull."

Musichetta sat straight up, the pillow sliding off and taking several hairpins with it. " _A skull_?"

"He wanted to drink out of it," said Joly.

"Give me the flask," said Musichetta and, since her hair was half-down, Joly could not think of doing anything but exactly what she wanted.

"Fair muse, my Juliet, will you let me look upon you?" Jehan called, righting the wad of fabric on his head meant to be a turban. Joly decided that the telescope needed more adjusting and fiddled with it in lieu of making the situation any more awkward than it already was.

Musichetta thrust the flask at Feuilly, moving him back, stuck her head out the window. "Monsieur Prouvaire, I am deeply flattered, but  _please go home and change._ "

Jehan was trying to remember the rest of  _Romeo and Juliet,_ however, and did not listen. His English was not very good, however, and his translation was therefore halting. "What light from… yonder breaking window… in the east… is the sun—"

"Look, this is really very sweet of you," said Musichetta, in some desperation, "but there's no need to…just please, no." She pulled her head back in. "God, I can't look at that any longer. Just to  _think_ that someone had to sit down and sew that- that god-awful insult to fabric, taste, the Orient and whichever grisette was unlucky enough to land the order!"

Jehan apparently interpreted Musichetta's inability to look at his vest as natural modesty, quite fitting in the muse inspiring him to higher flights of poetry, and began to recite one of his own poems, which, as per usual, had a startling high body count.

"You, euh… you can see Venus," said Joly, fiddling with the telescope. "Want to see, Citizen Feuilly?"

"Didn't think anything could outshine that vest," muttered Feuilly, bending down to look through the telescope. "Hunh, there it is. Is this thing strong enough to let you see the craters in the moon?"

"Only indistinctly. If you would allow me? Thank you." Joly swung the telescope around. "There's the moon and… oh, there's an end of our tour through Elizabethan England and contemporary France. We have now landed in ancient Rome." He offered his position in front of the telescope to Feuilly, who accepted eagerly.

Joly, deprived of distraction, half-listened to Jehan's Latin verses. "That's… hunh."

"What?" asked Musichetta, looking apprehensive.

Joly pretended to see a smudge on the body of the telescope and buffed it with his handkerchief. "Euh, it's, ah… Catullus. Veranius, being superior to all… oh, this is the one where Catullus takes Veranius by the neck and kisses him on the lips after he comes back from Spain."

"Catullus?" Musichetta asked.

"No, euh, Veranius. They're both men."

Musichetta bolted to the window and leaned past the telescope to shout, "You really don't have to do this!"

"I know," said Jehan, "but I want to." This meant, of course, that there was absolutely no stopping him and he continued on serenely, now threatening to sodomize anyone who thought he was floofy for writing love poetry.

"I can't help but think he chose the wrong poet," said Joly, as Musichetta mimed beating her head against the wall. "I mean, Jehan's taste runs to end-of-the-world type stuff, so he's probably reciting the love poetry he learned back when he first started in on Latin, since he knows no others—"

"Comparing Musichetta to a man is the wrong tactic," agreed Feuilly.

"That and Catullus is, euh…."

"A vulgar, mean-spirited bastard hung up on Lesbia, but willing to kiss his friends and threaten to rape anyone who displeases him?"

"Yes."

Musichetta grimaced and took a hearty swing from Joly's flask, which Feuilly had placed on the window sill. "Now, normally, I have nothing against two men kissing. I rather like the mental image. If that painter of Musetta's fantasized about me and Musetta together, why can't I fantasize about him and his friend the philosopher?"

"That is one of the most original applications of gender equality I've heard of," said Joly.

"Well, why shouldn't it be true? We're all equal in imagination, if not in actuality."

"We can be equal in scientific discovery," Joly pointed out, sitting down on Musichetta's bed, as Feuilly had taken one chair, to be able to look through the telescope without giving himself a backache, and it looked like Musichetta was about to collapse into the other. "It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman when you try to find the answers. I mean, du Châtelet found out more than Voltaire. It's just the application of natural laws. I think everyone ought to have equal access to the materials, so they can experiment and find the truth themselves. The discovery on your own is just as important as the truth itself. I mean, I'm all for objective truth, but it loses something if you don't make it true for you and find a way to apply it."

"Amen to that," said Feuilly, turning from the telescope to sort-of smile at Joly.

"I think it can work both ways too," Joly went on, as Jehan reached a particularly vulgar bit of verse. "As Voltaire has it, one must cultivate one's own garden. By self-cultivation, we can turn our own little patches into paradise, enter into the community with that scrap of heaven, and combine it all together to recreate Eden. Subjective truth becomes objective, then. It's all in the application and combination."

"If only  _he_ didn't apply his truth by reciting erotic poetry in Latin outside my window while wearing that vest," said Musichetta, dragging her chair over to Joly, and turning it so that she faced away from the window. "What's worse, homoerotic, vulgar, vaguely threatening Latin poetry."

Feuilly scratched at his sideburn. "My Latin's a little rough, but did I hear the phrase 'lowest part of her loins'? And… hunh, honey-sweet Juventius. That's another man, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't mind it if  _my land lady wasn't leaning out her window to listen_ ," Musichetta said, managing to find her point again. "Honey-sweet Juventius can go to hell. Oh God, I'm going to get kicked out."

Joly managed to catch Musichetta before she toppled face-first to the ground in despair. She rested her head in his lap and did not complain when Joly very tentatively stroked her hair. "Jolllly, you're  _acceptably_ eccentric. I think it's charming that you get so enthusiastic about Arago and make hot air balloons. Besides, you just keep it to a very flattering scarf, not a turban and the ugliest piece of clothing any grisette in the history of Paris has had to sew."

"I suppose I ought to take that as a compliment," Joly said, a little doubtfully. "I should get it tattooed somewhere, 'Musichetta knows I am not stupid enough to wear a turban'."

"Just as you ought," replied Musichetta, albeit to his knee. "Though, I do realize saying that you know better than to order a purple brocade vest with orange trimmings is not the greatest compliment anyone could receive. Feuilly am I hallucinating, or has he stopped?"

Feuilly got up to go look out the window. "He's taking out a… what-d'you-call it. It was in  _Zaire_."

"A  _zither_?" Musichetta demanded, horrified. "He could barely play the flute!"

"That's a damn sight better than he can play the zither," replied Feuilly, as Jehan twanged some of the strings. Musichetta hid her face against Joly's knee, and clutched at his free hand for comfort. Joly grew somewhat emboldened and ran his thumb across her knuckles. She had such lovely, small hands.

"Oh fair Muse, let my voice be pleasing unto thee," Jehan began, strumming the zither in accompaniment.

It very obviously wasn't. Musichetta groaned and pushed herself off of Joly's lap. "This has got to end." She leaned out of the window, careful not to bang into the telescope. "Monsieur Prouvaire, I really am flattered, but haven't you indulged me enough?"

"The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom," Jehan said. "If music be the food of love, play on, let me have surfeit of it—"

"No, let's  _not_ have surfeit of it," Musichetta said desperately. "There is  _no need_ for surfeit of it!"

"No need, perhaps, but the desire?"

Musichetta leaned her forehead against the side of the windowsill. "I have  _no desire_ to hear more of the zither!"

"Neither do I!" piped in one of her neighbors.

"No desire?" asked Jehan, gaping at her. "Surely your soul is not so shackled as all that?"

"My chief desire at the moment is to set that vest on fire," muttered Musichetta. "Oh God, I am too drunk to stand without support and I'm  _still_ not drunk enough to look at that vest."

"Let your soul be freed by the application of art! Let my poetry unlock the shackles so cruelly imposed upon you by society—"

"Oh please no," said Musichetta. "Having some sense of decorum is not being shackled. Realizing that there are some desires you ought not to indulge—" she eyed Jehan's vest with distaste "—or indulge in only in  _private_ is not being shackled."

"Better stab an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires," Jehan protested.

"Do you  _really_ want me to set fire to your vest?" Musichetta demanded.

Jehan did not seem to know how to react to this and had to think a moment. "If you really wanted to, that's fine. I suppose it would be exciting, to see the conflagration of societal limitations of self-expression, and this has grown rather too small for me. I used to wear it under an incroyables coat—oh, I could get you an early 1800s muslin gown, I have a wonderful supplier, and you would look just like a merveilleuse if you trimmed your hair! We would match."

" _As a_ _merveilleuse_ _!_  I—what the hell are you thinking?  _Are_  you thinking? Never mind, I give up. I'm going to drink myself asleep."

Feuilly had work in the morning, so he drank with them only until he tired of looking through the telescope and Jehan tired of getting with garbage from Musichetta's neighbors. At that point, Jehan went home and Feuilly went back to his room to sleep. Musichetta then took out the poems Jehan had been sending her and showed them to Joly. "I begin to think all his ranting about desire is only about  _his,_ and not anyone else's."

"In his defense, Jehan still has a cold," said Joly, shuffling through the poems. "One is always a little self-absorbed when one has a cold."

"Some of them are just odd too. End of the world, yes, I understand, he's a man, he likes to see things getting blown up, even if he contains his raptures in alexandrine couplets. The light imagery is beautiful, the classical allusions are apt, if a little odd, but his symbolism... God, I couldn't even understand it when I was sober. What, exactly, am I supposed to symbolize?"

"I think," said Joly, after skimming through the first few stanzas, "that we have to return to the empirical evidence, or else we'll just get bogged down in the body count and the foreshadowed romantic apocalypse. I don't know, perhaps I'm showing the deficiencies of an Enlightenment education, but I cannot always understand all his heady flights of Romanticism."

"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."

Joly searched his memory for a suitable witticism. "One merit of poetry few persons will deny. It says more, and in fewer words than in prose. Though, euh, this is ten pages long, so... perhaps not."

"Alas, Voltaire cannot stand against the onslaught of Romanticism." She shook her head. "What, exactly, does he think I am?"

"A symbol of the People, I think."

Musichetta tilted her head to the side, her gaze somehow teasing in its curiosity. "And what do you think I am?"

Joly smiled, rather ashamedly. "Musichetta Poquelin. I'm sorry, no imagination, or rather, a misapplied one. I get bogged down in particulars and once you have to dissect a person, it's hard to idealize anyone. People are people and have odd mooshy bits inside them. You're... well, you're Musichetta and you don't mind when I get excited over magnets and have a literary mind and lovely hands and the eyes of a fortune teller." Then, without really realizing what he was saying until after he had said it, "You're a thoroughly fascinating woman and one with whom I could see myself falling quite dangerously in love."

At that point, Joly turned a very bright pink, realized he had just ruined any chance he might have had and began stammering incoherently. Somehow or another, he managed to grab his overcoat, hat, scarf and walking stick and bolt out the door, down the stairs and out of the house without breaking a limb or dying of embarrassment.

He was considering whether it would be more embarrassing to chase down a cab or to run back to the Latin Quarter when he heard an amused, "Jolllly!"

Joly glanced up automatically and saw Musichetta leaning on her windowsill, not quite smiling, but not looking offended either. Joly buried his face in his scarf so that she wouldn't see that he was still a very ugly shade of pink. Damn the lamp and damn his father's northern genetic heritage. He wasn't a swarthy fellow like Bahorel; whenever he got embarrassed,  _everyone_ could tell.

"Joly, will you come again tomorrow?"

Would he...? Were his ears working correctly? Joly pulled his scarf away from them and experimentally rubbed one to be sure. She... she really had asked him to come again tomorrow, even though he was an insane failure of a medical student with no impulse control and no imagination. He started to smile again. "I... euh...."

"You could show me du Châtelet's experiment."

"I... right. If you want me to come?"

"As long as you dress appropriately and promise to speak in prose. Besides, you left your telescope here. Come back for it tomorrow."

She shut the window after that and Joly, about an hour later, found himself in the Café Musain without having made any conscious decision to walk back to the Latin Quarter, and without any memory of actually walking back. Though on any other day this would disturb him to the point of hysteria over the state of his health, fevers, the miasmas of Paris and the spread of contagion from the poor people who had the misfortune to be his patients, Musichetta wanted to see him again, so Joly took this with uncharacteristic aplomb, checked his tongue in his hand mirror only once, and then went to find Bossuet and buy him a drink.

The next day, Joly scarcely paid attention to his lecture and managed to get through his dissection lab only by the grace of God, some rambling on Hahnemann's theories of magnetic homeopathy and Saint-Hilaire's explanation of the carotid artery, and the unexpected incompetence of the students next to him, who had somehow managed to send the heart they were trying to diagram shooting off their dissection tray and into the professor. As soon as he had washed the blood out from underneath his fingernails, Joly bought a crystal prism (or rather, a chandelier pendant in the right shape), stuffed every thermometer he owned into his pockets, bewildered Combeferre by showing up at his apartment and demanding any thermometer Combeferre owned and then answering the question, "what do you need them for?" by holding up the chandelier pendant and grinning like an idiot.

When he had made his way up the stairs, Musichetta tied the pendant to a bit of string as Joly very carefully tried to get the thermometers to stick to the wall. He ended up just pasting them to the wall, as Musichetta told him that Musetta had put up the god-awful wallpaper and she had been meaning to take it down anyways.

"By the by," said Musichetta, glancing at him over her shoulder, "Feuilly seemed rather impressed with your theories on education."

"Euh? They're really Combeferre's. I'm more a doctor than a scientist—I take what someone else has already discovered and try to apply it as best I can to heal anyone in need of it."

"You've been convincing him to join your… study group, as it is?"

"The education of a society and a people," said Joly, absent-mindedly. "We are more than your average study-group, as Courfeyrac likes to point out. We concern ourselves with the liberation of mankind, not just the education of children."

"Through the application of science?"

"And posters, pamphlets, poems—anything we can, really. Combeferre and I volunteer at a clinic near Gobelins, that's where we met Feuilly, and Enjolras, he's our chief, though he sort of—I don't quite know how to describe it. He's the best kind of leader there is, keeping order without crushing creativity. He knows us quite thoroughly and pulls the best out from behind our flaws without ever bullying or forcing an issue. He has the same effect on everyone, and he's always doing something. I don't know how he does it- he sees where the ideal is in the world and he helps us all figure out ways to bring it out into the open. There we are, all set up." Joly stepped back, hands still outstretched and slightly above the thermometers to make sure said thermometers would stay in place. "There, that ought to do it. And… is that leprosy on my hand? Ah no, just the prism. I'm surprised my calculations actually worked out."

Musichetta laughed. "You are absolutely darling. Step out of the way and come watch with me."

Joly did so, and the two of them stood to the side of the window, watching the sunlight, divided into all its parts, each part as beautiful and brilliant as the whole, make a graceful ascent up the wall. "Thank you."

"I ought to thank you. I have never met anyone quite like you."

Joly made a face. "How kindly you phrase it."

"Kindness has nothing to do with it." She added to this a smile so wicked that Joly got hopelessly flustered and started to blush. He was conscious of a sudden happiness he could not quite control—she genuinely liked him, despite all his eccentricity and odd obsessions and compulsions, she  _liked_ him and Joly was absolutely wild for her. He was not entirely sure how he had fallen so hard and so fast, but he there he was, positively in  _love,_ and she  _liked_ him, she honestly  _liked_ him and—and there was the rainbow, drifting ever upwards towards the thermometers—

"Oh, it's almost there," Joly said, in some surprise.

The rainbow crept slowly up the wall. Musichetta seized Joly's hand. Joly was almost wild with joy, but could not bring himself to look at Musichetta and see if she had done it unthinkingly. Instead he focused on the slow ascent of the rainbow and thought it the most marvelous thing he had ever seen in his life. He was so incredibly happy his cheeks almost ached from smiling. There was nothing so wonderful in the world as that slow upward climb of light, the sudden squeeze from Musichetta's hand as it hit the thermometers, the rising temperatures even on the thermometer next to the red bar of light, Musichetta's happy, "Oh, Jolllly, it worked!" and the feel of her arms around his neck as the temperature of the infrared light increased and proved to all the world that Emilie du Châtelet was right and there was more wonder to the world than could ever meet the eye.

Into this moment of scientific geekery bordering on ecstasy came Prouvaire's voice and a lilting, "She walks in beauty like the night/of cloudless climes and starry skies/ and all that's best of dark and bright/meet in her aspect and her eyes—Jolllly?"

Joly had leaned out the window, too happy to contain himself, and waved ecstatically at Jehan. "Hallo!"

Jehan, today wearing a knock-off Byronic outfit, frowned. "You look happy. Why?"

"Light!"

Jehan clearly did not know how to react. He shielded his eyes to get a better look at Joly and said, a little uncertainly, "You mean... hm, I cannot quite grasp onto your symbolism. You have passed out of the darkness of societally-imposed thought, or have opened your eyes to the truth, or—"

"I just mean  _light_!" Joly cried, leaning further out the window. "Musichetta and I have been recreating du Chatalet's experiment on the temperature of colored light when white light is divided into colors through a prism, and there's a shade that  _we cannot see_ that still has a  _rising temperature_! Isn't it marvelous? There's this whole other part of light that we cannot see, but that we can  _understand_!"

"Oh Joly, how could you?" Jehan demanded. "You are taking the mystery out of the universe and vivisecting it until there's nothing left of dead pieces of what was once alive and sublime—"

"You don't understand at all," said Joly, much aggrieved. "By studying light, you take nothing away from it; you kill nothing in understanding what it is and how it works and what makes it what it is. You love it the more because you know; you  _personally_ know what it is about light that makes it so sublime! It's an objective truth that loses nothing in becoming a subjective reality."

"Joly—"

"It's an objective truth, Jehan!  _Anyone_ can find out that there's a color we can't see. Well, I suppose anyone can read a poem too, so there's probably some truth in writing and all, but it's so democratic, science! The result's the same for  _everyone_ if it's true. Everyone feels light; everyone sees its effects and anyone can find out just  _why_ it is the wonderfully sublime thing that it is! Oh, isn't it marvelous? It's  _light_!"

Musichetta was laughing, probably at him, but Joly was too happy to care. He pulled himself out of the window and turned to smile at her, hitting his head against the prism as he did so, and causing the rainbow to swing across her lovely, lovely face. Joly felt a delicious, delirious surge of happiness.

"Joly, you are too darling," she said, with such a smile. Joly wanted to keep her smiling forever. She held out her pretty hands to him, streaked with color from the prism and Joly was reminded of how, when he was a child, he used to love being in church just to sit under the stained glass windows and watch the colors drift across the floor and over all the parishioners. Joly was almost afraid to take her hands, but he did, and they were warm and soft in his own.

"I have another experiment for you," said Musichetta. "You mentioned yesterday a rather... interesting hypothesis as to the composition of one Musichetta Poquelin."

Joly felt himself blushing. "I, euh... yes, I believe I did."

"I think it's a worthwhile one," she replied, her beautiful dark eyes laughing up at him, "and I think you ought to pursue it. You never know the truth of something until you test it. That isn't to say I mean to make the process easy for you; any scientist ought to prove himself before embarking on an experiment of this magnitude. One never ought to be flippant when one experiments with the heart."

"Ha, euh, right," said Joly, whose ability to speak or think rationally had completely disappeared in a wave of overwhelming happiness.

"But... perhaps you ought to gather some empirical evidence?" She tilted her face up and Joly, having absolutely no control of his impulses what-so-ever, leaned down and kissed her.

He would have liked to have thought something poetic, like 'she tastes of love' or 'the kiss tasted of victory', but he was not thinking at all when he kissed her and Joly was too terrified of ending his sudden happiness and offending Musichetta to do anything involving tongues or tasting. He was quite simply happy.

And then, when he got embarrassed and pulled back to stammer incoherently at her, Musichetta told him, with a delightfully wicked smile, that one never knew the veracity of a conclusion until one had performed the same experiment multiple times and gotten the same result.

Before Joly hurtled headlong into bliss and shut off his brain completely, he thought, rather giddily, that Condorcet was right, the progress of science was the progress of humanity, one layered, wonderful search for understanding and the unexpected discovery of happiness.


End file.
